Spring semester: day forty-seven
As an aside, before I begin this post, some of you have probably been thinking something along the lines of he keeps track of the days in the semester? Yes, yes I do -- I write the little numbers on my calendar so that I can. It's a nice little countdown (or, really, count-up) to keep myself on task, to keep myself motivated to look for that little light at the end of the tunnel. I've done it for several semesters running now. The semester consists of seventy-five class days every time, which seems like a very small amount, but also keep in mind that those are just the days of the week, not counting weekends, etc, and there are six days of finals week (they start on Saturday, but that's not included in the count).
Today was a good day, overall. I decided to take today "off," so to speak; I always have Wednesdays off, but I could've spent the day buried in notes and studying more for comps if I'd wanted to. I didn't, however. I wanted a bit of a break from so constantly worrying about comps and about my readings and everything else, and I already know that this weekend I will be swamped with work and studying anyhow, so why torture myself needlessly between the two days I have to teach this week? Instead I slept until I was no longer tired (about eleven hours last night, from midnight to 11AM or so), got up, took a shower, and went to Walmart to get the groceries and items I'd need around the house before the weekend. It was only supposed to be in the low-to-mid-50s today; it ended up reaching 61 here, and it was gorgeous. I spent my afternoon catching up on the news and downloading the podcasts I've let lapse over the past several days, cooked a lunch of fresh turkey bacon -- something I got a sudden craving for while shopping today -- and did all of the laundry I've let accumulate for the past week or two. I put down new spider traps (as it's getting warm again, and when that happens the brown recluses like to come out), I filled all of my water jugs with new filtered water, and I let my humidifier dry out so I can clean it. These are all odds-and-ends things I've needed to do over the course of the past few weeks but have been unable to do because of my studies. I needed a break to actually decompress somewhat.
As I mentioned, this weekend is going to be crazy; I collect my students' workshop copies tomorrow in class, and will be spending the vast majority of Friday going over those. Tomorrow night, basketball starts up again for the weekend, so I'll at least be entertained while I'm editing workshop copies, but there are eighteen of them altogether -- a huge chunk of each of my classes chose workshop group 2. In addition to that, as it's the last weekend before comps, I have to hunker down in my study bunker (hunker in the bunker...I like that phrase) and review all of my notes, brushing up on some of the poets I covered before, reading through a bit of the criticism books I have, and (if the damned book gets here) reading through Stephen Crane. Many cigarettes will be smoked, and much coffee will be consumed. I just want to be as prepared as I possibly can be before going into that exam next week. As I told Daisy this evening, "Could I take the comps right now and do marginally, passably well? Yes. And I'd probably pass them just fine. But until I know that in my mind for a certainty, I need to keep studying and keep reviewing everything I can until I am super-confident in my abilities."
I talked to a longtime friend yesterday, a colleague who is now an adjunct in the department but who took her MFA poetry comps last spring, about how hard they were.
"They weren't hard for me," she said, "but then again, I studied psychotically for them."
This is true; her office at the time was across the hall from mine, and for many hours most days of the week she was not only sequestered in there studying, but memorizing things, taking notes, reading stacks of books, or otherwise burying herself in her source material -- in addition to rewriting/revising major parts of her final thesis project and attempting to juggle that with her home life. How she slept or found time to sleep, I'll never know. And she wasn't even teaching at that time.
"I'm not studying psychotically," I said. "At best, I'm studying pathologically."
I keep looking for someone to reassure me about comps, to tell me they're not as bad as they're built up to be, but really -- all of those people are gone and have graduated and moved on now. Those who have remained behind are mostly fiction people or MAs, and their comps are very different. I'm also under the gun of being one of the first few people to have taken comps with this particular professor as director, which could go either way. All in all? Yes, I'm a bit nervous. Understandably so. But I'm also trying to do everything I can to overcome that mountain of nervousness by studying enough to create a zen-like, Jedi-like calm which will permeate my body and mind before I take the actual exams. Some of the poems and/or poets I'm reading are just incomprehensible to me, and probably always will be -- I have to take that in stride, look for things I can write on about them, and keep pressing forward, knowing in a short nine days, it'll all be over regardless.
"I'm sure you'll do fine, baby," Daisy tells me. "You're really smart, you're really intelligent, and you've been studying a lot."
I'm not sure I'll know when a lot will translate to enough. I'm not sure there's a possible enough until after the exam is over. I've probably read close to 5,000 pages over the course of the past two months or so, and have filled two entire notebooks with notes, and put a good twenty pages down in a third. I still have a lot to read and study anew and again. It's not over. I'm filling my brain with as much as I can in order to be as prepared as possible. I want to go into that testing center with my lightsaber of knowledge and slice that fucking exam's arm off.
I can't stay focused on comps and on nothing else, though. That would be the definition of studying psychotically. It may work for some people, but it doesn't work for me. Not only do I have my normal responsibilities to fulfill within my daily life, but I am also a teacher, a father (to three cats), a fiance (to a beautiful, wonderful woman), and -- in case that wasn't enough -- I'm someone who needs sleep, needs some downtime. To these ends, I've tried to do some things that will take my mind off of my stress levels a bit. For example, I ordered a 2GB memory kit to expand the RAM in my old Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop in order to keep it running smoothly and convert it into a media center/portable DVD player for my bedroom downstairs. While it will play DVDs just fine now, it is really old and needs the RAM upgrade to keep it running smoothly with the newest Ubuntu Linux operating system. Since Daisy got me the new Satellite Pro for Christmas, I don't use the Dell at work anymore and it's just been sitting in my desk drawer, so I might as well repurpose it and get some use out of it. 2GB is the maximum amount of RAM it can use (it's eight years old), so there's no reason to get another TV or portable DVD player for the basement if I've already got something I can use for movie-watching purposes down there.
Little things like that, which are a bit distracting from all of my stresses at hand, tend to help me manage my time and apprehensions a bit better. I need to get a RAM upgrade for the Satellite that Daisy got me, as well, so that I can get it up to speed also. With the newest Ubuntu on that one, even, it's still slower than hell. My desktop, which is three years old, is much faster, which isn't how it should be since the laptop is brand new.
Daisy and I have set a tentative date for the wedding, a date which is very tentative and will rely very heavily on many, many different things to fall into place for us to be able to do it. We're also not telling anyone this tentative date so that people don't make plans and/or get their hopes up if it ends up falling through, but I will say that it is well over a year away -- so don't get in a hurry yet, folks. We've discussed this primarily because we're sick of everyone asking us "so when's the wedding date?" or some variation thereof, and if we can make this date work we'll at least have something to tell them to shut them up in the meantime...eventually, anyway. And no, I'm not going to mention it here until everything has been finished and solidified, especially as said date may change at any given time.
Daisy also starts her night shifts tomorrow night, which means that tonight is the last chance we really have to spend any normal amount of time together (digitally, of course, via Skype and Facebook). We have to figure out some sort of communication/time-together-schedule for the foreseeable future, since our schedules will clash so badly until graduation.
"When do you want to talk tomorrow?" she asked me. "I have to leave the house around 7:50 or so in order to get to work, and I work all night."
"I'll get home around 1 or so, probably not much later than that," I said. "But you'll be sleeping then. I can talk to you when you get up in the afternoon before you have to get ready, and then go to bed after that."
Daisy's work schedule frees up my nighttime hours so that I can focus on my studies and my own work, at the cost of not being able to spend a whole lot of quality time with her. Over the weekends, she'll be asleep while I'm awake and vice-versa, or I'll be awake doing work in the night while she's at work, or I'll be working on papers and studying during the day while she's sleeping, etc. Our paths won't be able to cross much. We knew this would be an issue when she got this job and have both tried to mentally prepare for it; Daisy and I have the sort of relationship where we absolutely need our daily "fix" of one another; most couples need a lot of communication and interaction, of course, but because we're hours apart from one another for the time being, it's...I don't know, amplified a bit for us. Maybe that's part of being engaged, part of being one soul split into two bodies or some other sort of flowery-languaged bullshit like that, but it's going to be difficult for both of us to get used to for a little bit. I love Daisy. Very, very much. And I get very lonely, very quickly, without her around.
The woman still needs to learn to appreciate my sense of humor a bit more, though. That's not a gripe, but an observation. I think I have one of the most unique senses of humor of anyone I know, and it's the one thing between us that doesn't mesh 100% most of the time. I'd give it a 60/40 ratio at best, actually.
"You don't always appreciate my sense of humor, love," she says in response. "I don't always have to think everything you think is funny is funny."
I know this, but damn, there are just some things that are hilarious to me that she won't find funny at all. She'd probably hate most of the movies I like which I find vastly amusing (most of Kevin Smith's films, for example). She doesn't like humor at the expense of someone else, for example, and I think that's where the best comedy comes from (and always has, duh).
Then again, she hates violence, too, in movies. I'll never be able to show her any Tarantino film (just got the special edition of Pulp Fiction on Blu-ray last week), for example. She'll never sit down with me and watch Robocop or any of the Die Hard movies either, because they're "guy movies" and "needlessly violent." The problem is that all of these films are cinematic masterpieces which changed film-making as a whole. Believe me, it was almost like pulling teeth to get her to watch the Star Wars trilogy, and aside from the battle scenes there's very little violence there. I believe everybody interested in films should watch the more modern classics, and she's not seen most of them (which is okay with me, of course, but still fascinating). Just looking through my DVD shelf next to me, there's The Silence of the Lambs, Forrest Gump, The Blues Brothers, Smokey and the Bandit, Airplane, The Untouchables, When Harry Met Sally, Weird Science, most of the Star Trek films, etc. I doubt she's seen any of them. I grew up with all the movie channels possible in my household -- I've seen a lot of movies in my day.
Yet she told me herself that today she watched the first three Twilight films one after another.
Oh, young padawan, I have much to teach you.
And that is a reference she won't get until she watches the prequels (which I also recently acquired on Blu-ray).
On that note, I'm getting off here and am going to bed soon. It's after 10PM, and I need to be able to get up at 5AM -- otherwise I'm not going to be able to teach effectively tomorrow, even if that's all I have to do before my weekend starts. Sigh. Off to dreamland I go.
No comments:
Post a Comment